The track was recorded in Paris last year with the excellent Jon Lefèvre-Reich and mastered by the legendary Valgeir Sigurðsson at his Greenhouse studios.

The song looks at a tragic moment in a young person's life in a sort-of kaleidoscopic way, interpreting it from different perspectives and moments in time and space. I wrote it on a piano given to me by my wonderful friend & former singing teacher Lisa Beckley and her husband Robin. It's maybe the first song I've ever written by sitting at a keyboard.

Matt (other 1/2 of SB) did such a particularly good job on this one. The electronic jolts in the chorus are so beautiful, and took the song in a whole different direction.

Our friend & maybe-future-labelmate Jethro Cooke made a beautiful video for the track, which you can watch here:

That's never something I thought I'd say, but I'm glad that it is. July 2017 was a month where the biggest things I'm working on this year all collided with each other. It was fun and kind of hectic.

After finishing up the year with concerts at Hampton Court House, I was off to Berlin for more work on Nils Frahm's upcoming album, All Melody. We had lots of fun recording in the stunning Funkhaus, and I was glad to be joined by 3 lovely singers from Shards: Heloïse, Kate and Lucy. The studio's grounds turned into one big summer barbecue park, and there was plenty of time to relax in the sun on the banks of the Spree.

Writing and recording in the Funkhaus with Nils & Shards

After this it was back to the UK for more Shards recording- this time for Michael Price's upcoming album, Tender Symmetry.

Each of the album's tracks will be recorded this summer/autumn in a different National Trust location around the country- this time we were at the Sandham Memorial Chapel, a quaint building filled with murals by Stanley Spencer. I spent all day taking arty shots of the choir in front of the murals, but it turns out that that's not allowed. Here's a picture of Michael sat on the floor with some synths instead...

The day after was spent doing two things- meeting with a record label to discuss Shards' debut album (more on that in the near future....) and recording double bass for our next Strange Boy EP. We spent a couple of hours with the awesome Marianne Schofield of the Hermes Experiment, making some beautiful and not-so-beautiful bass sounds (all on purpose, of course). I've known Marianne since we were sort-of at school together, and am very grateful for her contributions to this record!!

Marianne!

The day after Matt and I left London for New York, where we are recording our next EP thanks to the support of our Pledgers and the Emerging Artist Fund 2017. More about that soon...

Here we were at the end ofJuly and the start of our trip on the Highline, NYC.

I'm really pleased that Strange Boy has been awarded the Emerging Artist Fund 2017, a grant made possible by Help Musicians UK and Pledge Music.

We are using the financial help to go to New York this summer to record our next EP with the wonderful Jake Aron. We met Jake in Iceland last year and are really looking forward to working with him. We'll be having the EP mastered by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who did some amazing work on our Annunciation EP which we are releasing soon.

In order to receive the grant we need to run a Pledge Campaign, where fans can preorder our upcoming releases and bur some other fun things. Please have a look at our store here!!

Matt always describes our live set up as 'moody Pet Shop Boys'. Here we are rubbing shoulders with them on the Pledge website: